Top Chef, S9E15.

If you’re here, you probably saw my guest post on Bravo’s site ranking the final four chefs, with the usual dose of sarcasm along with the analysis. If you’re new to the dish because of that post, welcome! I also chatted with our internal PR folks about how the Top Chef opportunity came to pass.

Top Chef: Texas goes to Vancouver … I would poke more fun at the show’s geographical confusion, but Vancouver is awesome, especially for food, so I’ll let it slide.

* No Quickfire this week, just three “events,” with the winner of each event going on to the final three (turns out we have two more episodes, not just one), and the one chef who doesn’t win any of the three events going home. I like this format – the playing field is even, and you actually have to be the best in something to move on.

* That said, some of the hoops involved in the events before the chefs could really start cooking were absurd. The first one gives the chefs 22 minutes to cook a meal on induction burners in a moving ski gondola, which poses no end of problems for the chefs. Paul mentions getting motion-sick; Lindsay points out that they’re cooking at altitude (so the air pressure is lower and water boils at a lower temperature) and that the burners aren’t perfectly level. There are a ton of ingredients, including a lot of proteins, but Bev makes it sound like there isn’t much hardware available. At the midpoint, each chef must jump out of the gondola as it makes its turn, choose another ingredient from a small and weird set available on a table at the station, jump back into the gondola, and incorporate the new ingredient into the final dish. This is slightly bonkers, yet less bonkers than what comes later.

* The guest judges here are all former Olympic athletes, nobody with any food expertise, and none of them was even half as prepared as Charlize Theron. I need to get my agent on this, stat.

* Bev chooses to go with a raw dish, a salmon tartare; cold dishes can win on Top Chef, but I think the judges look askance at raw dishes, something not helped by Bev almost apologizing for serving something raw. The judges despise weakness. Anyway, Bev does get points for her horseradish-anchovy crème fraiche and for mixing textures with the raw fish and crispy capers and panko bread crumbs.

* Paul can’t get the lamb to brown, so he calls an audible, debones it, breaks it down further, and sears again to try to cook it through. This has to be an induction-burner issue – I’ve never used them, but I imagine it’s a big shift from a gas flame to induction. I’m assuming next week’s elimination challenge will involve giving each chef a book of matches and an axe and sending them into the forest to cook. Paul’s lamb is underseasoned, although Gail liked his curried enoki mushrooms. He certainly had a ton of elements with a wasabi crème fraiche and juniper gastrique as well, but if the protein isn’t good, you don’t win, and Paul was on the bottom.

* Sarah was pretty strong start to finish in this episode, and she proved me wrong by getting out of the regional Italian cuisine box with everything she cooked. In the gondola, she cooked chorizo with caramelized onions, deglazed with prune juice (her extra ingredient), gooseberries (for acid – they are a complete pain in the ass to cook with too), pickled mushrooms, and almonds, with a pancetta crème fraiche underneath the sausage (the one element here that sounded weird to me – the dairy might cut the heat if the chorizo was spicy, but that’s another tart element on top of 2-3 others). The gondola is cold enough to freeze ingredients/elements that aren’t on the burners. The judges’ only criticism was that the prune juice didn’t come through in the final dish, although she finished third.

* Lindsay panics that she didn’t cook enough salmon, so she cuts it in half and serves smaller portions, which the judges don’t notice. She seems to be increasingly prone to these mental miscalculations, or at least the editing is making it look that way. The creamy red quinoa ‘risotto’ with chorizo (recipe here, although I think the red farro should be red quinoa) sounds amazing, definitely something I’ll make at home, and she served that under the salmon and topped it with a horseradish vinaigrette. Lindsay wins with much praise for the quinoa and the perfectly-cooked salmon, although the judges say no one really screwed up. I think the final decision for Lindsay over Bev was hot over cold. I love a good salmon tartare, but Bev skipped the biggest challenge in the gondola – working with the burners.

* Second event: Free your ingredients from ice-block prisons (Michelangelo-approved?) and thaw them before cooking. Psycho jokes abound, which is too bad as Hitchcock made at least a half-dozen better movies, as the chefs attack the blocks with ice picks. No one gets stabbed, although if Marcel was on this season he might have wanted to keep his distance from the others. Meanwhile, Paul wins the Lady Byng Trophy for helping Sarah and Bev break apart their chosen blocks. Did anyone try slamming one ice block against another just to break them down into more managable chunks? Moral of the story: Next year’s chefs should pack blowtorches.

* Sarah goes with vegetables because they’ll thaw as they cook (good thinking), but her pea and spinach soup with turmeric and cream separates as she cooks it, and it seems like she couldn’t re-emulsify it with the hand blender.

* Beverly uses ice or snow to make up for the lack of liquid ingredients available to them, which I thought was pretty clever as long as the snow she chose was, um, white. Anyway, her seared scallops with a red wine-citrus reduction over couscous earned pretty high marks; Gail thought the sauce was heavy but Padma praised her for the rare Top Chef couscous success. Is couscous really that hard to cook? Maybe I haven’t been doing it right.

* Paul gets the prime ingredient, the king crab – maybe he felt guilty about this, so he helped the ladies afterwards – and poaches it (in what? I missed that), serving it with toasted almonds, mango chutney, and sliced brown butter. He wins. I think Bev was ahead of Sarah, not that it matters.

* Third challenge has Bev versus Sarah. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

* “Oh my God, she has a gun.” Third challenge involves humiliating the two remaining chefs by forcing them to do a mini-biathlon, cross-country skiing and then shooting targets to earn their ingredients. This really had zero value other than to make them look like klutzes – and I will confess right now I would have fared no better – but in the end, they both had plenty of ingredients, and the judging really came down to who did the better job in the kitchen, not who was more successful at the nonsense parts of the challenge.

* My wife asked a pretty good question – what if either chef had hurt herself while skiing? The two chefs did collide, but I think it was because Beverly was going the wrong way. I have no idea how that happens.

* Bev chooses to slow-roast her Arctic char, while Sarah braises her rabbit leg, both big risks given the time limitations, but risks tend to win on Top Chef, especially late in the season.

* Bev is looking for coconut milk and lemongrass, but finds none in the kitchen. Are we seeing – dare I say it – a little pantry bias here? Hide the kittens!

* Sarah mentioned roasting the rabbit loin, but I think her final dish was just the braised leg with sliced rabbit heart, cherries, hazelnuts, and a “kraut puree” of cabbage. I put Sarah at the bottom of my rankings for Bravo’s site because everything she’s cooked seemed to sit in a narrow range of regional Italian cooking, but this was outside of that box – she called it German, my first thought before she said that was Austrian, but either way we’re not in Lazio any more.

* Beverly’s char had a celery root/truffle sauce, an onion/beet compote, and shaved fennel. Gail praised Bev for taking a risk by putting strong, earthy flavors (more suited to game, perhaps) with the fish, but Tom felt the char disappeared because it was underseasoned. Obviously, I didn’t taste the finished product, but thinking through all of those flavors, I’m finding it hard to see how the char would stand up to the truffles, the onions, and the pronounced anise flavor of the fennel.

* Sarah wins, and given the judges’ comments it made perfect sense. Her elements worked together better than Beverly’s did. I’m pretty sure Padma was crying when Bev did her “thanks for the opportunity” soliloquy. I think becoming a mom has made her into a softie.

* Bottom line on this episode is that no one really screwed anything up, and despite some absurd conditions, the best food seemed to win each time. We didn’t have many bad decisions, and there was virtually no drama outside of the heavily-edited scenes from the car at the top of the episode. I’d really like to see the final two episodes just focus on the cooking, given who’s left and what’s at stake. No more hoops till next season, please.